Multi-core processor architectures utilize two or more independent central processing units (CPUs) to provide improved information processing capabilities over conventional single-processor architectures. A multi-core processor architecture enables information processing tasks to be divided into subtasks which may be parallelized across multiple threads running on the multiple processor cores of the multi-core processor architecture. Multi-core processor architectures are employed in a variety of information processing applications. For example, a multi-core processor architecture may be utilized to monitor the behavior of data traffic in a communication network, a capability which is important for many network management applications, such as resource provisioning, security, and the like. For many such applications that rely on traffic monitoring, real-time traffic monitoring invariably are performed. Real-time traffic monitoring requires processing of packets in real time, meaning that the speed of packet processing needs to keep up with the line rate of the communication link for which traffic is being monitored. This presents a considerable problem, because as the volume of traffic in communication networks continues to increase, the bandwidth on communication links of communication networks also increases and, thus, packet processing speed needs to increase. Disadvantageously, however, while multi-core processor architectures provide significant improvements in real-time packet processing and other information processing applications, the use of multi-core processor architectures for real-time packet processing and other information processing applications remains a challenging issue due to implementation issues often associated with implementing multi-core processor architectures.